SCO Receives Nasdaq's Delisting Notice

An anonymous reader writes "This somewhat amusing press release of sorts tells us one of those things we've all been waiting a while for. SCO(X) has announced that 'it received a Nasdaq Staff Determination letter on December 21, 2007 indicating that as a result of having filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Panel has determined to delist the company's securities from the Nasdaq Stock Market and will suspend trading of the securities effective at the open of business on Thursday, December 27, 2007.' PJ at Groklaw has surmised that with effectively zero cash resources left, Novell doesn't stand to get much more than SCO's furniture, if even that. Ding dong, is the wicked witch finally dead yet?"

If there was any proof....

[Chrisq]

Novell doesn't stand to get much more than SCO's furniture,

If there was any proof that this was by design (which it probably was) could the directors be held liable in the US?

New stock symbol

[Just Some Guy]

$0.18 to $0.12 [yahoo.com] in 45 minutes. Impressive!

Why the 6-day delay?

[davidwr]

The letter is dated 12/21. Why did it take until 12/27 to make the newswires?

Either SCO got it but didn't release it, or SCO didn't get it in a timely manner.

This should have been released to the public at least 1 trading day before the effective date.

McBride Goeth Before a Fall.

[h4rm0ny]

So the company is dirt. What's happened to the litigious bastards responsible? Has Darl McBride got away with a fat severance package and a job at Microsoft, or did the directors of SCO go down with their ship in any meaningful way?

Re:If there was any proof....

[Kjella]

In theory - yes.
In practise - I'll believe it when I see it. As long as the directors can drag up some crackpots to claim they acted in good faith based on their analysis or advice, they usually walk away with no problems at all. The level of deception and fraud you have to prove in order to make anyone personally responsible is very high, Gross incompetence is unfortunately not enough.

Re:If there was any proof....

[fataugie]

And honestly, don't most corporations carry insurance for their upper management to cover this sort of thing (personal lawsuits)? Unless they have something really damning, the worst that would happen is the insurance would pay off.

These guys aren't in the Enron/Global Crossing/Tyco realm....they're just fucking idiots.

The best move they could do now

[SigmundFloyd]

Now they have a way to redeem their memory forever: release SCO UNIX's full source code to the public domain.

Mod parent up

[R2.0]

"If there is any justice, the executives and the lawyers are held liable. Why include the lawyers? While it was a frivolous lawsuit brought by the company, the lawyers were the ones executing dirty tactics in the court while getting paid by the millions. They knew well what they were doing."

It's worse than that - part of their compensation was stock. That means that they were
a) part owners of the company, and
b) they had an inherent conflict of interest as officers of the court. They had a huge incentive to act unethically with the lawsuit - they didn't get paid unless SCOX stayed at a high value, which is substantially different from getting paid if they won the suit.

Re:McBride Goeth Before a Fall.

[fwarren]

It is not likely that they will appeal. Standard operating procedure is they have to put up some money into a trust in case Novell does prevail. They don't have the money to put in the trust. Even if the US Bankruptcy Trustee would green light the deal. So they can claim they have been wronged all day long and that they will appeal.

Practically speaking the only way they can even have a chance with IBM is if they can fulfill step one in the process. Who owns the copyrights. SCO has to own them to be able to continue with the case. Until they win IBM or come out of bankruptcy, they don't have them money to appeal the Novell decision. Until they appeal the Novell decision, they don't have a chance of owning the copyrights they need to win the IBM case. Thus a perfect chicken and the egg or catch 22 scenario.